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EDITOR’S NOTE: Following is an abridged version of Chapter 13 of “Adrift in America: Diary of a Minimalist Mariner,” a work found in the nonfiction section:

Denver, Colorado. September 1985.

I don’t notice him in the shadows until I have driven nearly through the underpass, so by the time I pull over to the side of the road, there is a fair distance between us. As I back up, it appears to me that he is too old and heavy to be jogging as easily as he is toward the car.

When he gets in, I can see that the heaviness of his torso doesn’t match his slender face and hands. He isn’t old, either – mid-20s at the most.

Has he been waiting long?

“Since last night,” he says.

In the warmth of the car, he starts unbuttoning his shirt – I should say shirts. Three, maybe four of them, all different plaids. Between layers two and three, he wears a broad white wrapping around his stomach and lower rib cage.

“Injury?” I ask.

“Sheet,” he says. “That’s what I slept under last night.”

Why has he been waiting in the underpass instead of out in the open where he could be more easily seen?

“The weather,” he says. “It comes on you quick up here.”

The day is crisp and bright, the kind of day mountain resorts wait for to have their brochure photos shot.

Steve Lutes is a good-looking young man with pale features that look delicate within their frame of shaggy black hair. Given a shave, a haircut and a three-piece suit, he would fit right in on Wall Street. And that is a depressing thought. His manner of speech also is delicate – quiet, slow, deliberate – and I let him take his time.

Steve follows the seasons. Spring and summer in Denver. Fall and winter in Tucson. Since he doesn’t work in either place, his only means of transportation is his thumb. His parents live in Tucson, but they don’t like him around. Something about his being a bad influence on a younger sister. Instead, he hangs out at a church where he rakes leaves and does other chores in exchange for a bed and an occasional meal.

In both places, because of his predominantly outdoor lifestyle, Steve occasionally runs into the police, who just as occasionally lock him up for the night. Although he has no church for a haven in Denver as he does in Tucson, he says he likes the police in Denver better.

“Why’s that?” I ask.

“The Denver cops don’t step on your fingers.”

He turns out to be right about the weather. We are traveling along an eastern rib of the Rockies, and while the road is doing only gentle ups and downs, it isn’t so obvious that the downs are bottoming out at more than 4,000 feet. In New Hampshire, where I come from, Mount Washington is the highest peak in the Northeast at only 6,000 feet. I have no experience with weather that starts at that altitude.

We are headed up a rise between two ridges when the stars go out like someone has pulled a black sheet across the sky, and from the darkest part of it, a pitchfork of lightning comes down in three prongs. I roll down my window and stick my face into the air to see if it is cold enough to freeze. Probably not, I decide, but without much resolution. It is, after all, September, and we are in the mountains.

Now I know that lightning doesn’t always descend from sky to earth. Lightning also can rise from earth to sky. But I learn in Colorado that when the earth is in the sky to begin with, lightning can go all over the place. What has been a quiet alpine landscape turns into a drive-through electric arcade, lights flashing from every direction, long spikes of incandescence arching across the sky, touching down in bony fingers that leave faint scratches on your vision as they disappear.

I look over at Steve. He is sitting stock still, his right foot pulled to the seat so that his right knee is higher than the left, both arms straight out with the elbows bent so that his hands are lined up vertically at his face, one hand in front of the other as if he is about to give the world a solemn nose-thumbing.

“It’s a karate position,” he says secretively, his lips barely moving. “It protects you from everything.”

He looks pretty weird sitting like that with his profile etched in green light from the dashboard. But I have to admit it makes me feel safer. And we never do get hit by lightning. Or any precipitation, for that matter.

My next exposure to Steve’s karate comes the following day after a long stop in the northeastern grasslands of New Mexico – Steve suggests I borrow a bolt from an engine mount to secure an emission-control pulley that keeps whirling off, a solution I also would have thought of in, say, two or three days – when we stop for an early dinner at a restaurant near Albuquerque. It is a fancy-looking place in a plastic sort of way, and Steve is hesitant about going in, but I have found that most restaurants will admit even the most commonly dressed patrons as long as they are quiet, clean and pay their bills. We qualify on at least two of those counts.

While the hostess is taking us across an open space that appears to be a dance floor, I notice that Steve is no longer with us. The hostess and I look back, and there is Steve, stuck in his karate pose, right knee up, elbows bent, hands at his face, staring up at a large spherical glass fixture filled with multicolored lights. He stands there unmoving, like a praying stork.

“He’ll be all right in a minute,” I tell the hostess with a confidence I have no reason for. To her credit, she says simply, “Fine,” and continues leading me to a window seat. People at tables around the edge of the dance floor must notice Steve, but they never so much as glance his way.

When Steve sits down a minute later, he says, “Those lights try to control you.”

I say nothing.

“Look at those,” he says, pointing into the window. “Don’t you feel they’re trying to control you?”

“Steve, those are reflections from that globe thing over the middle of the floor.”

“Reflected lights are worse,” he says. “They’re more powerful.”

Thank god for LSD, I think – the gift that keeps on giving, the lift that keeps on living, the score that has a thousand refrains and no finale. No wonder his parents are scared.

On the morning of the third day, after a night of tossing down toasts of beer and wine to Elephant Butte, a name I found on the road atlas, and sleeping on the ground near Truth or Consequences, we watch a red sun come up over mountains that look like pipe organs as we drive into southern New Mexico. It is time for us to split, Steve west along Route 10 and I south into Mexico.

We stop for breakfast near Las Cruces at a diner that is empty except for a middle-aged waitress who looks as hard as the white formica counter. We order breakfast and try to sip coffee. Steve has to go off to the men’s room, probably to throw up. The waitress, who has spent most of the time we have been there with her back to us, looking into the window where she has placed our orders, comes over to me and says:

“Your friend’s schizophrenic, huh?”

“Huh?” I say, hearing my echo.

“Poor kid. I’ve got a son who’s just like that. Real quiet, like he’s someplace else most of the time. Hard time concentrating. Easily distracted. Gets obsessed with things.”

“Well . . . yes, that’s right.”

“I knew it when you walked in here. Poor kid. People are so cruel. I guess they’re afraid. But, my god, my son couldn’t hurt anybody. He’s hurting too much himself.”

She stands wiping an ashtray without looking at it.

When Steve returns, our breakfasts are ready. He eats silently, bent over the counter, facing down into his plate. He is an intent eater, stuffing eggs and sausage and fried potatoes into his mouth, his eyes darting from side to side as he eats.

I’ve seen dogs eat like that, and it didn’t have anything to do with schizophrenia. Somebody had hit them too much.

I leave Steve as I found him, under an underpass, this one on Route 10 west. I give him some money that I know will be gone soon and a thermal blanket that we both know he probably won’t keep beyond the first night. Too much bulk around his waist.

Steve will stick with his sheet, pulling it over himself at night, trying to keep the world outside, especially if he is in a place where he has to keep his fingers in there, too.

– Sid Leavitt